Royal William Victualling Yard-Plymouth (10 black and white images)

grebeman

Old Codgers Group
Built between 1826 and 1835 The Royal William Victualling Yard supplied Royal Navy ships from Devonport dockyard with most of the supplies required for their voyages.

The grade 1 listed yard was decommissioned and sold in 1992 and has become an area of up market flats (apartments), boutiques, offices and restaurants housed in impressive Georgian buildings.

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The imposing main gateway to the yard topped by a statue of King William IV after whom the yard is named

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One of the pedestrian gates alongside the main vehicular gate

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Part of the river frontage

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The swing bridge and the entrance to a small inner basin

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Some of the detail on the iron work of the swing bridge, in this case a naval anchor

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And here the makers nameplate

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Some of the original equipment has been left in place. This crane overlooking the inner basin bears a name once seen in ports and harbours around the world, that of the famous Bath based crane makers Stothert and Pitt

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The same Stothert and Pitt crane with in the background the clock tower

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One of the unusual bollards carrying the date 1830

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Ironically posed outside the former slaughter house, these cows would have actually avoided such a fate, however up to 100 bullocks were slaughtered every day to provide the navy with the infamous barrels of salted beef, with up to 100 coopers employed making those barrels. As a small boy my parents landlord was a retired cooper from this yard. Perhaps a more welcome product stored in barrels was the navy rum or grog.

Barrie
 
What's your recipe?

Barrie,

What were these shot with and how did you post-process them? Several of them are very. very crisp.

If I had to guess, I would say a kind of B&W HDR treatment, but I could well be totally wrong. I like them all, but #1 and #3 are particularly striking.

Cheers, Jock
 
Barrie,

What were these shot with and how did you post-process them? Several of them are very. very crisp.

If I had to guess, I would say a kind of B&W HDR treatment, but I could well be totally wrong. I like them all, but #1 and #3 are particularly striking.

Cheers, Jock

Hi Jock,

No HDR treatment, I've never tried that. Camera and lens were G6 with the new Panasonic 14-140mm f/4-5.6. I would have probably benefited from being able to use something wider which I've been thinking about this morning, but am somewhat undecided over. I think that the elderly Olympus 9-18mm lens would perform well when stopped down to f/8, the 12mm prime would be better at larger apertures, I think the Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 is rather a non starter in terms of lens tests I've been consulting and the 7-14mm is too wide for me, I don't feel comfortable with the perspective. Anyway back to the question posed.

They were shot in RAW with post processing carried out in DxO Pro 9. There is no module as yet for the new 14-140 lens so editing was fully under manual control. I applied some distortion control. When using Photo Ninja I'd done some tests with the Panasonic 14-45mm lens shooting a square grid at various focal lengths to determine the distortion amount to use and had drawn a graph with a smooth curve to enable me to determine the amount to use. I did some similar shoots with the new lens in the 14-45mm focal length region and was able to compare results from Photo Ninja and DxO in order to determine the amount to use in DxO. For some I also applied the 2 parallel line correction built into DxO. There was some slight exposure adjustment applied to some shots as well as adjustments of the highlight, midtone and shadow values as thought necessary. The sharpening in DxO was set at 200 for each image.

The outputted file was opened in Photoshop CS2, then sent to Silver Efex Pro 2 where it was adjusted taking care not to add any structure, adjustments were mainly done in the contrast section of the global adjustments sub panel with an increase in the Amplify Blacks and Amplify Whites sliders to 30-50% depending on the original image, then some adjustment of the Contrast and/or Soft Contrast sliders to obtain as nice an inverted U type histogram as possible followed by my customary check on the Zone System Map to make any further slight adjustments to the tonal values of the finished image.

Once back in Photoshop the resulting layer was flattened, mode changed to grayscale mainly to reduce the image size and perhaps final tweeks using the shadows/highlight adjustment.

That all sounds very long winded, but in the time it's taken me to write this I could have processed several images.

I hope that explanation is reasonably comprehensible.

Barrie
 
Barrie, I figure since Google searches this forum, it's OK if we share? Or should I ask permission first? (These questions always occur to me too late!) I sent my husband a link to these and he enjoyed them very much. He trained as a naval historian, although teaching in a community college in the US he doesn't get to put that training to much use. As long as I've brought him up, I have to boast about him a bit. He wrote his thesis on the Mary Rose, and he traveled to England to consult the Pipe Rolls, which was more dedication than most of us at Southern Illinois University displayed!
 
Barrie, I figure since Google searches this forum, it's OK if we share? Or should I ask permission first? (These questions always occur to me too late!) I sent my husband a link to these and he enjoyed them very much....

Hi Ruby,

No problem with you sharing these with your husband, or indeed anyone else, I see that page 2 of Google has a link to this thread, so it's open house.

I'm pleased to hear that your husband enjoyed them.

Barrie
 
I enjoy your work very much Barrie and this set are the cats whiskers for me��

"Olde" Bill Gordon

Hello Bill,

I was going through some old posts in the last day or two over on m4/3 and saw your avatar several times which set me to wondering how you were, and then you surface, good to hear from you, I trust you are well and thank you for your comments, much appreciated.

Barrie
 
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